*** Last Call for Project Showcases ***
International Conference on Software and Systems Reuse, Product Lines,
and Configuration (VARIABILITY 2026)
29 September - 2 October 2026, 5* St. Raphael Resort and Marina
Limassol, Cyprus
https://conf.researchr.org/home/variability-2026
The VARIABILITY conference series brings together the communities previously served by
ICSR, SPLC, and VaMoS, forming a unified venue for research on variability, configuration,
customization, and related disciplines in software and systems engineering. As part of this
mission, VARIABILITY 2026 invites submissions to its Project Showcase Track, a forum
dedicated to presenting ongoing or recently completed research projects.
The track offers a stage for research teams to share their vision, goals, early outcomes,
intermediate results, final achievements, and lessons learned from funded projects of all
scales, including collaborative research centers, EU projects, and nationally or regionally
funded initiatives. The goal is to encourage interaction, foster collaboration opportunities,
and help disseminate project insights to the broader community.
Objectives and Scope
We welcome submissions on research projects that address reuse, product lines, and
variable/configurable software systems. A list of research topics that are relevant for this
track is available from the call for the papers for the VARIABILITY 2026 Research Track, at:
https://conf.researchr.org/track/variability-2026/variability-2026-papers#C…
Submissions are expected to describe ongoing or recently completed research projects
within this scope. This track is not intended for publishing mature research results.
Instead, it focuses on project summaries and overviews, highlighting goals, structure,
challenges, insights, and project level impact.
Examples of suitable submissions include:
• Ongoing projects focusing on goals, challenges, methodology, or early findings
• Recently completed projects summarizing outcomes, evidence, and impact
• Large scale, collaborative, or multi partner efforts, where visibility and networking are
beneficial
• Smaller or emerging projects that would benefit from early feedback and exposure
PhD thesis projects are not in scope for this track. We warmly encourage PhD candidates to
submit their work to the VARIABILITY 2026 Doctoral Symposium.
Submission Format
• Length: 7 to 10 pages, excluding references
• Format: LNCS (Springer), single blind submissions
Each submission will receive feedback from three reviewers.
All submissions must adhere to the LNCS (Springer) format. Please refer to the official
LNCS template at
https://www.springer.com/gp/computer-science/lncs/conference-proceedings-gu… .
Submissions must be in PDF format and submitted via EasyChair:
https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=variability2026 (Select “Projects Showcase
Track”).
Presentation and Publication
Accepted papers will appear in the VARIABILITY 2026 Companion Proceedings published
by Springer in the LNCS series. Accepted submissions will receive a presentation slot. At
least one author of each accepted paper must:
• Register for the full conference, and
• Present the contribution at the event
Evaluation Criteria
Submissions will be evaluated on:
• Relevance to the conference scope
• Clarity of project goals, context, and contributions
• Potential for impact, collaboration, reuse, or technology transfer
• Value for discussion and interaction at the conference
The focus is on clarity, relevance, and value to the community rather than scientific
novelty.
Important Dates (AoE)
• Submission of Papers: 1 June 2026
• Notification of Acceptance: 21 June 2026
• Camera-Ready Submission: 15 July 2026
• Author Registration: 15 July 2026
Organisation
General Chairs
• George A. Papadopoulos, University of Cyprus, Cyprus
• Gilles Perrouin, FNRS & University of Namur, Belgium
Research Track Chairs
• Thorsten Berger, Ruhr University Bochum, Germany
• Ina Schaefer, KIT, Germany
Industry Track Chairs
• Shaukat Ali, Simula Research Lab and Oslo Metropolitan University, Norway
• Martin Becker, Fraunhofer IESE, Germany
Journal First Track Chairs
• Mathieu Acher, University Rennes, Inria, CNRS, IRISA, France
• Xhevahire Tërnava, LTCI, Télécom Paris, Institut Polytechnique de Paris, France
Doctoral Symposium Track Chairs
• Rick Rabiser, LIT CPS, Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria
• Iris Reinhartz-Berger, University of Haifa, Israel
Demos and Tools Track Chairs
• Sandra Greiner, University of Southern Denmark, Denmark
• Leopoldo Teixeira, Federal University of Pernambuco
Projects Showcase Chairs
• Daniel Struber, Chalmers, University of Gothenburg, Radbound University, Sweden
• Dalila Tamzalit, Nantes Université, France
Hall of Fame Chairs
• Martin Becker, Fraunhofer IESE, Germany
• Goetz Botterweck, Lero - The Irish Software Research Centre and University of Limerick, Ireland
• Natsuko Noda, Shibaura Institute of Technology, Japan
Workshops Chairs
• Lidia Fuentes, Universidad de Malaga, Spain
• Malte Lochau, University of Siegen, Germany
Tutorials Chairs
• Loek Cleophas, Eindhoven University of Technology and Stellenbosch University, The Netherlands
• Mahsa Varshosaz, IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark
Proceedings Chair
• Sophie Fortz, King's College London, UK
Publicity Chairs
• Wesley Assunção, North Carolina State University, USA
• Kentaro Yoshimura, Hitachi Ltd, Japan
Local Organiser and Finance Chair
• George A. Papadopoulos, University of Cyprus, Cyprus
Hello.
A position suitable for a qualified undergraduate student with the right to work in Ireland has become available. Questions may be directed to fintan.obyrne(a)adaptcentre.ie with subject line:
Research Assistant UX/Interaction Designer.
For details, see:
https://www.adaptcentre.ie/careers/research-assistant-ux-interaction-design…
Colleagues are seeking a research assistant UX/Interaction Designer to support the team on a temporary basis for the following workloads:
● AI Dataset pre-processing tasks – Review large dataset of CC0 images and carry out batch operations on audited subsets to normalise the data for model training.
● Support the maintenance of a documented design system that will be utilised for the generation of screens for various workflows
● Mocking screenflows using AI assisted design tools and processes
● Visual testing of screens and logging of issues
● Manual content population of art catalogues for pilot projects
Qualifications and skills
● This position is ideally suited to an undergraduate studying UX/Interaction Design
● Experience with Photoshop, Figma essential
● Experience with AI assisted design tools like Claude Design essential
● Knowledge and familiarity with the history of art a definite advantage
● Prior experience working with large visual datasets a definite advantage
This is a hybrid 3-month specific purpose research assistant position. Candidates must be available to work on site in the ADAPT Centre in Trinity College Dublin as required. Please direct any questions to fintan.obyrne(a)adaptcentre.ie with subject line: Research Assistant UX/Interaction Designer.
All my best,
Carl Vogel
In this newsletter:
New publications:
MADCAT Phases 1-3 Composite Evaluation Set<https://catalog.ldc.upenn.edu/LDC2026T05>
CALLHOME German Second Edition<https://catalog.ldc.upenn.edu/LDC2026S06>
CALLHOME German Lexicon Second Edition<https://catalog.ldc.upenn.edu/LDC2026L04>
________________________________
New publications:
MADCAT Phases 1-3 Composite Evaluation Set<https://catalog.ldc.upenn.edu/LDC2026T05> contains the evaluation data created by LDC for Phases 1-3 of the DARPA MADCAT program and the NIST OpenHaRT<https://www.nist.gov/itl/iad/mig/openhart> 2010 and 2013 evaluations. It consists of handwritten Arabic documents scanned at high resolution and annotated for the physical coordinates of each line and token, digital transcripts, and English translations with content and annotation layers integrated in a single MADCAT XML output.
This release includes 1,643 images and corresponding annotation files. Source documents were web text and newswire collected by LDC. Arabic-speaking scribes copied documents by hand, following specific instructions as to the writing style, writing implement, and paper. Each page was scanned and the images annotated.
The goal of the MADCAT program was to automatically convert foreign language text images into English transcripts for use by humans and downstream processes, including summarization and information extraction. The core evaluation task in MADCAT was the translation of handwritten Arabic documents.
2026 members can access this corpus through their LDC accounts. Non-members may license this data for a fee.
*
CALLHOME German Second Edition<https://catalog.ldc.upenn.edu/LDC2026S06> was developed by LDC and contains 48 hours of speech from 100 unscripted telephone conversations between native German speakers. This publication is a re-release of the original CALLHOME German collection, combining CALLHOME German Speech (LDC97S43)<https://catalog.ldc.upenn.edu/LDC97S43> and CALLHOME German Transcripts (LDC97T15)<https://catalog.ldc.upenn.edu/LDC97T15>, with additional transcription and updated directory structure, file formats, and documentation.
This release contains the 100 telephone conversations published in CALLHOME German Speech which represented training data (80 calls) and development data (20 calls). Participants spoke on topics of their choice in a single telephone call lasting up to 30 minutes. Calls were manually audited for language, recording quality, channel characteristics, dialect, and region. For this second edition, all audio was converted from SPHERE files to FLAC format, and the original training/development partitioning was removed.
This release also features revised transcripts conforming to updated LDC transcription guidelines that addressed normalization of annotation formats, standardization of speaker-produced and background noises, application of foreign-language marking, whitespace cleanup, and corrections and consistency fixes.
The CALLHOME series consists of telephone conversations and transcripts developed by LDC and Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, in support of research in speaker identification, language identification, and related technologies. Languages in the series include American English, Egyptian Arabic, German, Japanese, Mandarin Chinese, and Spanish.
2026 members can access this corpus through their LDC accounts. Non-members may license this data for a fee.
*
CALLHOME German Lexicon Second Edition<https://catalog.ldc.upenn.edu/LDC2026L04> was developed by LDC and contains 318,809 German words with morphological, phonological, stress, and frequency information. This second edition updates file formats, directory structure, and documentation. The first edition is available as CALLHOME German Lexicon (LDC97L18)<https://catalog.ldc.upenn.edu/LDC97L18>.
The words in the lexicon were derived from the CELEX German lexicon (CELEX2 (LDC96L14)<https://catalog.ldc.upenn.edu/LDC96L14>) and from 100 training and development transcripts representing unscripted telephone conversations between native German speakers contained in CALLHOME German Second Edition, LDC2026S04.
The lexicon has seven tab-separated information fields: (1) headword: orthographic form; (2) morph: morphological analysis of the headword; (3) pron: pronunciation of the headword; (4) stress: primary stress information of the word; (5) celex: whether the headword appears in the CELEX German lexicon; (6) train_freq: frequency of the headword in the CALLHOME training transcripts; and (7) dev_freq: frequency of the headword in the CALLHOME development transcripts. This release also includes a pronunciation dictionary derived from the lexicon in CMUdict<https://stdlib.io/docs/api/latest/@stdlib/datasets/cmudict> format.
2026 members can access this corpus through their LDC accounts provided they have submitted a completed copy of the special license agreement. Non-members may license this data for a fee.
To unsubscribe from this newsletter, log in to your LDC account<https://catalog.ldc.upenn.edu/login> and uncheck the box next to "Receive Newsletter" under Account Options or contact LDC for assistance.
Membership Coordinator
Linguistic Data Consortium<ldc.upenn.edu>
University of Pennsylvania
T: +1-215-573-1275
E: ldc(a)ldc.upenn.edu<mailto:ldc@ldc.upenn.edu>
M: 3600 Market St. Suite 810
Philadelphia, PA 19104
Dear colleagues,
The submission deadline for CLEF 2026 has been extended to 25 May 2026 (AoE).
We invite submissions to the 17th Conference and Labs of the Evaluation Forum (CLEF 2026), to be held in Jena, Germany, from 21–24 September 2026.
CLEF 2026
Conference and Labs of the Evaluation Forum
Information Access Evaluation meets Multilinguality, Multimodality, and Visualization
https://clef2026.clef-initiative.eu/calls/papers/
Important Dates (AoE)
* 25 May 2026: Extended full paper submission deadline (Long; Short; Past, Present, Future)
* 29 May 2026: Best of 2025 Labs paper submission
* 26 June 2026: Notification of acceptance
* 17 July 2026: Camera-ready version due
* 21–24 September 2026: Conference in Jena, Germany
Aim and Scope
The CLEF Conference addresses all aspects of Information Access in any modality and language. CLEF consists of the presentation of research papers and a series of workshops presenting the results of lab-based comparative evaluation benchmarks.
CLEF 2026 continues the CLEF campaigns running since 2000, contributing to the systematic evaluation of information access systems through experimentation on shared tasks.
The conference focuses on experimental Information Access as carried out within evaluation forums such as CLEF Labs, TREC, NTCIR, FIRE, MediaEval, RomIP, SemEval, and TAC, with particular attention to multimodality, multilinguality, and interactive search.
CLEF welcomes submissions describing rigorous hypothesis testing regardless of whether results are positive or negative. Reproducibility and clear research design are strongly encouraged, as are links to code and data repositories.
Topics of Interest
* Information retrieval, question answering, recommender systems, image retrieval, search interfaces, and infrastructures
* Interactive and conversational search evaluation, including RAG systems
* Analytics for information access
* Reproducibility and replicability studies
* Fairness, accountability, transparency, ethics, and explainability (FATE)
* Low-resource and multilingual information access
* Collaborative and social data models
* User studies and crowdsourcing
* Evaluation methodologies, metrics, and statistical tools
* Technology transfer and deployment
* Domain-specific applications (health, legal, cultural heritage, social media, etc.)
* New data collections
* Reflections on past achievements and future research directions
Paper Categories
* Long research papers: 12 pages + references
* Short research papers: 6 pages + references
* Past, Present, Future papers: up to 12 pages
For details on submission and formatting, please refer to https://clef2026.clef-initiative.eu/calls/papers/
Best Paper Award
One outstanding paper will receive the CLEF 2026 Best Paper Award, sponsored by Springer LNCS, including a certificate and a €500 prize.
We look forward to your submissions and to welcoming you to Jena for CLEF 2026.
Best regards,
Philipp Schaer, Eva Zangerle
Program Committee Chairs CLEF 2026
############################
ICMI 2026 CALL FOR LATE-BREAKING RESULTS (LBR)
===============================================
5-9 October 2026, Napoli - Italy
https://icmi.acm.org/2026/
===============================================
Dear colleagues,
Please find below the Call for Papers for the Late-Breaking Results (LBR) track of the 28th ACM International Conference on Multimodal Interaction (ICMI 2026).
Based on the success of the Late-Breaking Results (LBR) track, ICMI 2026 will continue soliciting submissions for this special venue. The goal of this venue is to provide a way for researchers to share emerging results at the conference. Accepted submissions will be presented in a poster session at the conference, and the extended abstract will be published in the Adjunct Proceedings (Companion Volume) of the main ICMI Proceedings. Like similar venues at other conferences, the LBR venue is intended to allow sharing of ideas, getting formative feedback on early-stage work, and furthering collaborations among colleagues.
* Online Submission
https://new.precisionconference.com/submissions/icmi26a
* Highlights
- Submission deadline: June 21st, 2026
- Notifications: July 15th, 2026
- Camera-ready deadline: August 2nd, 2026
- Conference Dates: October 6–8, 2026
- Submission format: Anonymized short paper (four-page paper in a double-column format, not including references), following the submission guidelines
- Selection process: Peer-Reviewed
- Presentation format: Participation in the conference poster session
- Proceedings: Included in the Adjunct Proceedings (Companion Volume) and ACM Digital Library
- LBR Co-chairs: Daniel Riccio and Hung-Hsuan Huang
* What are Late-Breaking Results?
Late-Breaking Results (LBR) submissions represent work such as preliminary results, provoking and current topics, novel experiences or interactions that may not have been fully validated yet, cutting-edge or emerging work that is still in exploratory stages, smaller-scale studies, or, in general, work that has not yet reached a level of maturity expected for the full-length main track papers. However, LBR papers are still expected to bring a contribution to the ICMI community, commensurate with the preliminary, short, and quasi-informal nature of this track.
* Why submit to the Late-Breaking Results track at ICMI?
Accepted LBR papers will be presented as posters during the conference. This provides an opportunity for researchers to receive feedback on early-stage work, explore potential collaborations, and otherwise engage in exciting, thought-provoking discussions about their work in an informal setting that is significantly less constrained than a paper presentation. The LBR track also offers those new to the ICMI community a chance to share their preliminary research as they become familiar with this field.
Late-Breaking Results papers appear in the Adjunct Proceedings (Companion Volume) of the ICMI Proceedings. Copyright is retained by the authors, and the material from these papers can be used as the basis for future publications as long as there are significant revisions, as per the ACM and ACM SIGCHI policies. LBR papers will be published as ACM extended abstracts in the Adjunct Proceedings. Under ACM Open, extended abstract article types are not subject to Article Processing Charges (APCs).
* Submission Guidelines
Extended Abstract
An anonymized short paper, four-page paper in a double-column ACM conference format, using LaTeX or Word (excluding references). Papers should follow the same guidelines as papers published in the proceedings of the ACM ICMI conference. The paper should be submitted in PDF format and through the ICMI submission system in the "Late-Breaking Results" track. Due to the tight publication timeline, it is recommended that authors submit a very nearly finalized paper that is as close to camera-ready as possible, as there will be a very short timeframe for preparing the final camera-ready version, and no deadline extensions can be granted.
Anonymization
Authors are instructed not to include author information in their submission. In order to help reviewers judge the situation of the LBR relative to prior work, authors should not remove or anonymize references to their own prior work. Instead, authors should refer to their own prior work in the third person during submission. After acceptance, such references can be changed to first person if desired.
* Review Process
LBRs will be evaluated to the extent that they are presenting work still in progress, rather than complete work, which is under-described in order to fit into the LBR format. The LBR track will undergo an external peer review process. Submissions will be evaluated by a number of factors, including (1) the relevance of the work to ICMI, (2) the quality of the submission, and (3) the degree to which it fits the LBR track, for example, in-progress results. More particularly, the quality of the submission will be evaluated based on the potential contributions of the research to the field of multimodal interfaces and its impact on the field and beyond. Authors should clearly justify how the proposed ideas can bring measurable breakthroughs compared to the state of the art.
* Attendance
Similar rules for registration and attendance will be applied for authors of LBR papers as for regular papers. Further information will be made available later on the conference website.
* Website
For updates, please visit: https://icmi.acm.org/2026/late-breaking-results/
* Contact
For further questions, contact the LBR co-chairs, Daniel Riccio and Hung-Hsuan Huang, at:
icmi2026-latebreaking-chairs(a)acm.org
We would be grateful if you could circulate this call among colleagues and interested researchers.
Best regards,
ICMI 2026 LBR Chairs
Daniel Riccio and Hung-Hsuan Huang
Retrieval-Augmented Generation Enabled by Knowledge Graphs (RAGE-KG) Workshop
- Co-located with: International Semantic Web Conference 2026
- Location and dates: Bari, Italy, October 25-29, 2026
- Workshop website: https://2026.rage-kg.org/
- Submission link: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=ragekg2026
- Abstract registration deadline: July 17, 2026
- Submission deadline: July 24, 2026
RAGE-KG explores the state of the art and goes beyond in integrating Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) with Knowledge Graphs as well as the synergies between Large Language Models and the Linked Open Data ecosystem. We aim to foster innovative RAG architectures relying on Semantic Web standards and new approaches to make Linked Open Data usable by LLMs, enhancing their ability to generate reliable, verifiable and context-aware responses based on structured, decentralized and authoritative data sources.
Submission Guidelines
- Short papers describing novel research contributions and preliminary results. Related to workshop topics. 4-6 pages excluding references.
- Full papers describing novel research contributions of extended length. Related to workshop topics. 8-12 pages excluding references.
- The papers will be peer-reviewed (single-blind) by multiple researchers.
- Upon acceptance, one author must register at the conference and present at the workshop.
List of Topics
- RAG Architectures
- RAG and KAG (Knowledge-Augmented Generation) architectures leveraging Knowledge Graphs, Semantic Web standards and Linked Data
- RAG and KAG design patterns including GraphRAG and AI Agents
- Evaluating RAG and KAG architectures with structured data
- LLMs and Structured Data
- Training and fine-tuning LLMs with structured data
- Prompting Language Models with structured data
- Language Model-supported and ontology-supported SPARQL query generation
- Innovative Approaches
- Neurosymbolic approaches for integrating Language Models with Linked Open Data, Semantic Web and Knowledge Graphs
- Use Cases, Work-In-Progress and, especially, Bold Proposals for RAG systems
- Special track on RAG-systems for Human-AI Value Alignment
- RAG-based approaches for content moderation and harm reduction;
- Designing RAG systems to deal with human subjectivity
Committees
- Organizing committee
- Daniel Dobriy
- Marco Antonio Stranisci
- Arianna Graciotti
- Blerina Spahiu
- Sahar Vahdati
Publication
- Papers will be submitted to be published with CEUR (https://ceur-ws.org/) and must follow the 1-column CEUR format (https://ceur-ws.org/HOWTOSUBMIT.html#CEURART):
- Overleaf template (https://www.overleaf.com/latex/templates/template-for-submissions-to-ceur-w…)
- Latex template (https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ZY4bp2loFKkves6HE7q5j0HaQRT7ov06ZtmO3vZ…)
Venue
- Where
- ISWC 2026 | Bari, Italy
- When
- October 25–26, 2026
Contact
- All questions about submissions should be emailed to daniel.dobriy(a)wu.ac.at
Call-for-papers : Natural Language Processing, Text Mining and Applications (NPL-TeMA’26) Track of EPIA’26
NLN-TeMA’26 will be held at the 25th Portuguese Conference on Artificial Intelligence (EPIA 2026) taking place in Colégio dos Jesuítas do Funchal, Madeira, Portugal, from 2-4 September 2026. This track is organized under the auspices of the Portuguese Association for Artificial Intelligence (APPIA). EPIA 2026 . URL https://epia2026.web.uma.pt/
This announcement contains the following: [1] Track description; [2] Topics of interest; [3] Important dates; [4] Paper submission; [5] Track fees; [6] Organizing Committee; and [7] Contacts.
[1] Track Description
The Track on Natural Language, Text Mining and Applications (NLP-TeMA 2026) brings together researchers and practitioners working in Human Language Technologies, including Natural Language Processing (NLP), Computational Linguistics (CL), Natural Language Engineering (NLE), Text Mining (TM), Information Retrieval (IR), Large Language Model Research and Applications (LLMs), and related areas.
As text remains the primary medium for creating and sharing knowledge, vast amounts of natural language data are generated daily across the Web and other digital platforms. This continuous growth presents significant opportunities—and challenges—for developing methods that can effectively understand, analyze, and extract value from textual information. Advances in NLP, Machine Learning, and Deep Learning have strengthened the role of language technologies in transforming semi-structured and unstructured data into actionable knowledge. NLP-TeMA 2026 welcomes contributions addressing both theoretical foundations and practical applications, fostering research that connects methodological innovation with real-world impact.
Authors are invited to submit their papers on any of the issues identified in section [2]. Revision of the papers will be double-blind by the members of the Program Committee. All accepted papers will be published by Springer in a volume of Springer’s Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence (LNAI) corresponding to the proceedings of the 25th EPIA Conference on Artificial Intelligence, EPIA 2026.
[2] Topics of Interest
Theories, Algorithms and Models
• Language and Cognitive Modeling
• Tagging, Chunking and Parsing
• Morphology and Word Segmentation
• Natural Language Generation
• Discourse and Pragmatics
• Semantics and Text Inference
• Language Resources: Acquisition and Lexical Knowledge
• Textual Entailment and Paraphrase
• Entity Recognition and Word Sense Disambiguation
• Natural Language Understanding
• Language Modeling
• Mathematical Properties of Language
• NLP for Low-Resource Languages
Text Mining and NLP Applications
• Text Clustering, Classification and Summarization
• Sentiment Analysis and Argument Mining
• Computational Social Science
• Multi-Word Units
• Machine Learning for NLP and Text Mining
• Spatio-Temporal and Large-Scale Text Mining
• Machine Translation and Cross-Lingual Approaches
• Algorithms and Data Structures for Text Mining
• Information Retrieval and Information Extraction
• Question-Answering and Dialogue Systems
• Text-Based Prediction and Forecasting
• Web Content Annotation
• Domain-Specific Text Mining Applications (Health, Biomedical, Legal, etc.)
• Large Language Models: Architectures, Tokenization, Prompting and Adaptation
• Offensive Speech Detection and Analysis
[3] Important dates
Abstract submission deadline: May 15, 2026
Paper submission deadline: May 29, 2026 (AoE) (strict deadline – no extensions will be granted)
Notification of paper acceptance: Julyy 12, 2026
Camera-ready papers: July 25, 2026 (AoE)
Conference dates: September 2-4, 2026
[4] Paper submission
Submissions must be full technical papers on substantial, original, and previously unpublished research. Papers can have a maximum length of 12 pages, including references. All papers should be prepared according to the formatting instructions of Springer’s author guidelines. Authors should omit their names from the submitted papers and should take reasonable care to avoid indirectly disclosing their identity. References to own work may be included in the paper, as long as referred to in the third person. All papers should be submitted in PDF format through the conference management website at: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=epia2026
[5] Track Fees:
Track participants must register at the main EPIA 2026 conference.
[6] Organizing Committee:
Joaquim Silva, jfs(a)fct.unl.pt, DI – FCT/UNL, Quinta da Torre, 2829-516 Caparica, Portugal; (+351) 910 211 766 (Contact person).
Pablo Gamallo, Pablo.gamallo(a)usc.gal, Universidade de Santiago de Compostela, Praza do Obradoiro, 0, 15705 Santiago de Compostela, Spain; (+34) 881816426 .
Alípio Jorge, amjorge(a)fc.up.pt, Dep. Ciência de Computadores, Fac. Ciências, Universidade do Porto; 351 220402 959 .
[7] Contacts:
Joaquim Francisco Ferreira da Silva, DI/FCT/UNL, Quinta da Torre, 2829‐516, Caparica, Portugal. Tel: (+351) 21 294 8536 (ext. 10732) / (+351) 910 211 766 ‐ Fax: (+351) 21 294 8541 ‐ E‐mail: jfs [at]fct [dot] unl [dot] pt
Call for Papers: 3rd Workshop on Language Understanding in the Human-Machine Era (LUHME)
The LUHME 2026 workshop on Language Understanding in the Human-Machine Era is part of EMNLP - The 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (https://2026.emnlp.org)
Workshop description
LLMs have revolutionized the development of interactional artificial intelligence (AI) systems, due to their accessibility to the general public. Significant advances continue to be observed in fields and applications such as multimodal conversational agents, emotionally and socially aware dialogue, hyper-personalized and context-adaptive interaction, human–AI collaboration and symbiotic AI, multi-party and social conversation modelling, immersive and embodied conversational systems, and responsible, controllable, and domain-aware interaction. The use of these interactional AI systems is increasingly widespread, as these models have produced remarkable achievements in several benchmarks. State-of-the-art NLP systems achieve impressive performance, but remain prone to brittleness in language understanding (LU); they often lack robust modelling of communicative intentions, pragmatic inference, and context-sensitive meaning, which are central to many EMNLP tasks (dialogue, QA, safety, content moderation, etc.). This raises doubts about the extent to which such systems can really understand human language(s).
The rapid deployment of LLMs raises urgent questions about interpretability, trust, and accountability of systems that produce linguistically plausible but potentially misleading outputs. In this scenario, this dedicated workshop provides a venue for cross-fertilisation between formal/theoretical work and applied NLP, in line with EMNLP’s focus on cutting-edge, high-impact research in NLP.
The 3rd Language Understanding the Human-Machine Era workshop (LUHME 2026) focuses on how meaning is represented, inferred, and negotiated across human and machine environments, with particular emphasis on logic-aware, pragmatics-sensitive, and socially grounded approaches to LU in NLP. The workshop brings together researchers in (computational) linguistics, formal semantics/pragmatics, dialogue and discourse, cognitive science, and AI safety/ethics to discuss what it means for systems to understand language in situated, interactive contexts.
Relevant topic areas
Submissions are invited on (but not limited to):
*
Language understanding in LLMs
*
Language grounding
*
AI‑mediated communication in high‑stakes domains (law, health, finance, governance)
*
Psycholinguistic approaches to Language Understanding
*
Discourse, pragmatics and Language Understanding
*
Intent detection
*
Computational treatment of speech acts, dialogue, and communicative intentions in interaction
*
Conversation analysis, narrative progression, and argumentation
*
Turn‑taking, repair, and alignment in human–AI interaction
*
Evaluation of Language Understanding
*
Human vs. machine Language Understanding
*
Machine translation/interpreting and Language Understanding
*
Multimodality and Language Understanding
*
Socio-cultural aspects in Language Understanding
*
Effects and risks of language misunderstanding
*
Manifestations of language (mis)understanding
*
NLU and toxic content
*
Ethical issues in Language Understanding
*
Distributional semantics and Language Understanding
*
Linguistic theory and LU by machines
*
Linguistic, world, and commonsense knowledge in Language Understanding
*
Role of language professionals in the LLM era
*
Understanding language and explainable AI
*
Use of LLMs in generating, analysing or evaluating linguistic data
Diversity and Inclusion
We particularly encourage submissions from underrepresented groups from any demographic or geographic minority, with disability, or others. The LITHME network (the nest of this proposal) is inherently inclusive, as it involves members from all EU countries and promotes participation from linguistic minorities. The workshop expands these principles of inclusion, by bringing language and computer scientists to the discussion on computational approaches to LU.
Paper Submission
Prospective authors are invited to submit original, unpublished work to the LUHME workshop, covering one or more of the workshop topics. Submissions must not have substantial overlap in either contribution or text with work previously accepted for publication as a full paper in another archival forum. Papers at workshops without archival proceedings and preprints are accepted.
At least one author of each accepted paper must register for the conference by the early registration deadline to present the paper at the workshop. This is a prerequisite for inclusion in the proceedings.
Submission Instructions
Papers must be written in English, be prepared for double-blind review using the ACL LaTeX template, and not exceed 8 pages. Authors are encouraged to include an ethics and/or a limitations section, which, together with references, does not count towards the page limit.
Papers must be submitted via OpenReview. (https://openreview.net/group?id=EMNLP/2026/Workshop/LUHME)
Proceedings
As in previous editions of the LUHME workshop, we intend to publish accepted papers in the ACL Anthology.
Proceedings of the First LUHME Workshop<https://aclanthology.org/volumes/2024.luhme-1/>
Proceedings of the Second LUHME Workshop<https://aclanthology.org/volumes/2025.luhme-1/>
Important dates
30 June 2026: Paper submission deadline
31 August 2026: Notification of acceptance
15 September 2026: Camera-ready papers
October 2026: LUHME workshop
Programme Committee
TBA
Workshop Organisers
Rui Sousa-Silva (University of Porto, Portugal) Henrique Lopes Cardoso (University of Porto, Portugal) Maarit Koponen (University of Eastern Finland, Finland) Antonio Pareja-Lora (Universidad de Alcalá, Spain)
CALL FOR SHORT PAPERS
DAAFRICA'2026 - Workshop on Data Science and AI for Agriculture in Africa
https://cari-conf.bj/calls/cari-workshops/daafrica-read-more
Workshop supported by ASDS
Event affiliated with CARI’2026 (https://cari-conf.bj/)
October 21, 2026
Cotonou, Benin
SCOPE
Agriculture remains a cornerstone of Africa’s economy and livelihoods, yet the sector faces persistent challenges related to productivity, climate variability, market access, and food security. In response, the African Union Commission has developed a Digital Agriculture Strategy (DAS), adopted in February 2024, to foster universally accessible broadband and unlock the benefits of internet-based services for agriculture. The Inaugural African Union Conference on Digital Agriculture (December 2025, Addis Ababa) further emphasizes the need for innovation, climate-smart practices, and digital transformation to shape agricultural policy for Africa’s future.
Data science has become a key enabler in this transformation. With the growing accessibility of data, farmers can now analyze information to facilitate decision-making. Emerging technologies such as the Internet of Things (IoT) enable the collection and storage of farm and environmental data (e.g., soil moisture, water levels, weather conditions) in dedicated databases or data warehouses. These agricultural datasets can be combined with other sources—remote sensing, weather stations, satellites, web platforms, and social media—to address new challenges, including the ingestion and integration of heterogeneous data.
Data science in agriculture aims to explore and mine agricultural data using a range of techniques, including machine learning, deep learning, computer vision, text mining, and large language models (LLMs). By leveraging these tools, agricultural professionals and decision-makers can generate actionable insights and knowledge to guide agricultural activities across Africa. This aligns with the focus of many African initiatives on digital agriculture: deploying low-cost, equitable digital tools to collect, manage, and analyze reliable data for decision-making, risk management, and support for the agro-ecological transition.
TOPICS OF INTEREST
This workshop encompasses all aspects concerning the intersection of data science and IA for agriculture in Africa, including but not limited to:
- Smart Farming
- Yield and Production
- Plant Species Identification
- Land Cover Monitoring
- Crop Recommendation
- Crop Monitoring and Forecasting
- Animal and Plant Health Monitoring
- Agroecology and Water Management
- Food Safety and Security
- Nutrition and Health
- Forests and Agroforests
- Soil Preservation
- Policy and Regulation
SUBMISSIONS
Researchers, academics, and students working on the field of data science with application in agriculture in Africa are invited to submit short papers for oral presentations or posters. Submitted abstracts must be in English and will be reviewed by the workshop committees for suitability and interest to the DAAfrica audience. The authors can submit papers of unpublished work reporting original and early results, introducing new ideas or describing prototypes.
Every accepted submission must have at least one author registered for the workshop. All submitted extended abstracts must follow the LNCS format in latex (https://www.springer.com/gp/computer-science/lncs/conference-proceedings-gu…) with a page limit of up to 6 pages including the title page, figures, references, and an optional appendix. The abstracts should be submitted electronically in PDF format via EasyChair via the following link: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=daafrica2026
Accepted extended abstract will be published as CEUR proceedings.
IMPORTANT DATES
- Submission deadline: June 26, 2026
- Notification to authors: July 15, 2026
- Camera-ready deadline: July 31, 2026
- Workshop: October 21, 2026
PARTICIPATION
The workshop will be held in Cotonou, Benin, as an event affiliated to CARI’2026. This workshop will be a hybrid event that combines a “live” in-person event with a “virtual” online component.
WORKSHOP CHAIRS
- Paulin Melatagia, University of Yaoundé I, Cameroun
- Mathieu Roche, CIRAD, UMR TETIS, France